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“Whatever it is you think you’ve done, I can assure you, you’re not a bad person.” I raise my head to object but he stops me with a gentle hand. “Listen to me. I’ve seen the goodness in you.” He hesitates. “There are things about me, if you knew, might make you think differently of me. Perhaps if you can accept them, then you’ll understand there’s nothing you could tell me to make me change my feelings toward you.”
The deep, sweet timbre of his voice reverberates against my ear, and even though I know there’s nothing he can tell me that will fix everything, I’m content to let him talk as long and about whatever he wants. I give a little nod.
I feel him take a deep breath. “I had an older brother named Moses who died when I was a young boy. You saw his portrait with my mother when you were at my house, and, judging from what you said earlier, you’ve heard of him somehow already.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Even though I’ve heard this story before secondhand from Mrs. Tidewell, hearing it from his own lips sends fresh waves of pity and sorrow through me. My words are inadequate to express how truly sorry I am, but Mr. Barrett brushes the top of my head with a kiss before going on.
“He was a cruel, vicious boy, though my mother doted on him all the same. He could do no wrong in her eye. She spoiled him, dressing him like a little prince, buying any trifle that might catch his fancy in a shop window. He expected to get anything he wanted, and if he didn’t he would throw such tantrums. My mother would try to subdue him, often at the expense of injury to herself. I remember the livid bruises around her wrists that she used to try to hide with her sleeves.”
“But... Your father. That is... I thought...”
I can feel Mr. Barrett look down at me, feel his surprise as his body tightens. “I would ask you where you heard that, but I have a feeling I already know.” He takes a long, strengthening breath. “No, it wasn’t my father. When Moses hurt her it wasn’t intentional, it was always in the act of thrashing out during a tantrum. He loved her just as strongly as she loved him. But when he turned his sights on me, there was no mistaking his intentions. I was a small child—weak, my mother used to tell me—and there were many evenings I came home from playing with him in the woods with a black eye or bloody lip.” The smallest of tremors runs through his voice. “God forgive me, but I hated my own brother.”
I shiver. If he started this story as a distraction for me, it’s veered into something else. His words come faster, more urgent, as if he must unburden himself of whatever it is he’s been carrying with him.
“My father was a gentleman, in every sense of the word. He pleaded with my mother to send Moses away to a boarding school in Hartford. On the rare occasions when he disciplined Moses himself, my brother screamed and howled so wretchedly that my mother would collapse in fits of tears. I watched my father transform into a bitter, hollow man, driven to drink.
“One day Moses was in the nursery, even though he had long outgrown his room there. He had emptied out the chest where I kept all my prized wooden soldiers and was lining them up as target practice for his little rifle. It was thick and gray outside, and Moses had brought in a lamp to set on the floor for more light.
“I don’t know what made that day different for me, but instead of slinking away, I went up to Moses and demanded that he stop. He pushed me, and though I was smaller, I pushed back. When he turned his rifle on me, I grabbed the lamp from the floor and threw it at him. It missed, and landed at the foot of the window, shattering. The drapes ignited and before I knew what was happening, flames were shooting up to the ceiling.
“My mother heard the commotion downstairs and came running. When she found us, Moses was red-faced and coughing on the floor. I was frozen. I must have looked guilty as sin. I never thought that the fire would spread so fast, that my brother would suffer a fit. My mother was kneeling beside him, trying to get him to his feet and escape from the fire. I...”
For the first time he falters, and instinctively I curl my fingers into his hair, wishing I could take away all his pain.
“I ran out of the room, slamming the door behind me. But you see, the nursery door locked from the outside. I never meant to... I never thought about what I was doing.” His voice is flat, his eyes devoid of emotion.
“I didn’t stop running until I was halfway down the road to town, where I met my father on his way home. I told him that a fire had started, that I didn’t know how. He rushed off but by the time he got there it was too late. Half the house was in flames, the other half already collapsed. They found my mother’s body where the nursery had been, but Moses’s body was never recovered.”
My skin prickles. Moses is still out there, wandering the woods. Lost and angry.
“Afterward, a rumor began going around town that my father had flown into a jealous rage against my mother, locking her and her favorite child in the house as he set it ablaze. My mother was a great beauty, and well loved in the town. Everyone turned against my father and he lost his business, his standing, everything. He had drunk himself to death by the time I was sixteen.”
“Oh, John.”
“You’ll think me insane, but my brother haunts me still. I hear him laughing, laughing at me in my dreams. He...the day I met you, in the woods behind the mill, I was looking for him.” He glances at me to gauge my reaction. When I don’t say anything, he goes on. “Sometimes I fancy I see him, just a glimpse, in the woods. I chase him, hoping that if I can just catch up with him I can beg him to go, to let me be. But I never do. You must have thought me terribly rude when we first met, but I hope you’ll understand why now I was so dismayed to learn your father had brought his family here. There’s something about this place, something terrible and sad. It invites tragedy. I think it’s always been that way, long before Moses and I came along.”
I find his hand with mine. “You’re not insane. I’ve seen him too. Spoken with him. I...” I stop myself, not sure how much I should tell him about what I’ve experienced. Moses is still here, his mortal remains forgotten and trapped beneath our house. The laughter, the footsteps, the endless watching, it’s always been him. And the wailing in the night, the pale lady pacing the garden, that must have been his mother, her spirit somehow trapped, endlessly searching and mourning her beloved son.
Mr. Barrett studies me, his face unreadable. He’s very still, only the slightly quicker pulse in his neck betraying that he’s not in full possession of himself. He clears his throat. “Well,” he says. “Now you know my darkest secret. I killed my own mother and brother, and I was responsible for the death of my father as well. I don’t tell you this because I seek absolution or even because I’m haunted by guilt. I tell you because whatever it is you think you’ve done, whatever it is that you think can come between us, I guarantee that you’re wrong. If you can take me as I am—secrets and all—then I can take you as well.”
We’ve come to the fork in the road again. One path leads to more secrets, more walls, more heartache and loneliness. The other path, once dark and closed, now opens before me in blinding illumination. I can put my hand in John’s and we can walk together in love and truth. My resolve shrivels up to nothing, the last bastion of familial responsibility crumbling in the wake of his confession.
So I tell him everything. I pray he’ll still want me when I’m finished. It pours out of me, everything from Catherine and Charles, to the baby and what became of it, the darkness that has plagued me since coming to Willow Hall, and even Cyrus and what he’ll do if I don’t marry him.
Mr. Barrett listens patiently, not once interjecting or flinching, even when I can’t help but doing so. His steady, solid presence gives me the courage to go on. I unburden everything to him, everything except the book that lies wrapped in a shawl in my trunk upstairs and what my mother told me this afternoon.
For what man in his right mind would want a witch for a wife?
* * *
I’m not in John’s arms the next morning when I awaken, but in my own bed, tucked up and warm with a well-stoked fire. I turn my head, almost expecting to see him sitting in the chair, watching me, like that day he came to visit me after the pond. But only the weak morning sun and crackling of the dying fire fill the room.
Catherine throws the door open, glaring at me. “So glad that you’re getting so much sleep. It’s your turn to sit with Mother. I’m going to bed.”
“I told you I would sit with her last night but you insisted on staying with her.”
But Catherine doesn’t want to hear it. She gives a martyred sigh and disappears to her room. I close my eyes, desperate to cling to the dozy warmth of the bed, to the memory of my fingers twined through John’s hair, of his promise that whatever must be faced we’ll face together. If not for that I don’t think I would have strength enough to swing my feet onto the cold floor and pad to Mother’s room.